In his Life of Pericles, Plutarch devotes nearly half of his narrative to the very careful preparations that his protagonist made for his entrance into political life. He employed some of the finest sophists (read media consultants, script punchers, and spin doctors) of his day to lend his speeches the rhythm and the timing that would reinforce the qualities of lofty and dispassionate analysis that he emphasized in his personal appearance and his “ready on the most important days” campaign narrative.

Most interestingly, today, Plutarch writes, “[E]ven Pericles, with all his gifts, was cautious in his discourse, so that whenever he came forward to speak he prayed the gods that there might not escape him unawares a single word which was unsuited to the matter under discussion.”

No doubt, Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain are uttering these prayers constantly now. As Senator Obama opined after his “bitter” comment slipped through to the media last week, there are people who are “obsessing” about everything that he says, and he is surely correct. There are people willing to parse every single utterance of each of these candidates for any word “unsuited to the discussion.” They must surely be very careful.

However, the bigger context of Plutarch’s Pericles is useful to understanding this development. In the opening of the biography, Plutarch claims that there is a real difference between poets and sculptors who make something “beautiful in appearance” and statesmen who actually “benefit others by their actions.”

Over the course of the narrative, that seemingly firm distinction is stealthily but steadily erased as Plutarch reveals that Pericles’ reputation as one of the greatest statesmen of antiquity is itself little more than a carefully cultivated appearance created by the protagonist’s collaboration with a series of political “artists” who help him craft the facade of great successes. The Acropolis building project (for which Pericles is still celebrated) proves to be little more than a grandiose jobs program. It was designed to secure Pericles the votes that he needed to maintain a constant hold on the highest elective offices. During this reign of more than two decades of political dominance, Pericles “rules” by constantly inflaming and manipulating the population’s aspirations to be “great” and “beautiful” while leading Athens steadily towards bankruptcy and a war she cannot win. Our celebration of him, Plutarch suggests, is little more than evidence that we are easily fooled by the “appearances of beautiful things.”

We too have developed a politics of aesthetics. We do not select candidates with proven records of getting things done for the citizens (alas Bill Richardson and Tommy Thompson - we are not interested in your resumes), but we are interested in the beautiful well-crafted speech. We are not in a position to choose candidates based on their policies, and in last night’s debate, ABC did not even try to slide some issue between Obama’s and Clinton’s respective, and identical, health care plans. We are interested in finding out whether their sentiments betray the slightest sense of insult to ourselves.

Meanwhile, we wear proudly a more telling rebuke to our claims of democratic competence – we have embraced an approach to our own public business that is all about the politics of appearance and the ability of a candidate to craft a perfect image of a statesman (or statesperson). One suspects that these candidates have embraced this politics because it suits their talents and their chances. Why we as a people choose to conduct our business in this way may be a more complex question.

We want to elect the most stunning portrait of political excellence, and we insist that this Olympian statuary can never show any of the cracks, stresses, complexities, or inevitable errors that real statesmanship necessarily involves.

Pericles’ pre-speech prayers at least suggest a certain self-knowledge: He knows how the game is played, how the game benefits him, and what he must now guard against. When American politicians, especially those who have been competing for the highest office, act as though they are shocked (shocked!) to discover that every appearance, however incidental or meaningless, may be their undoing, we must wonder whether they have noticed how this process has worked so far.

Are people obsessed with looking for every ill-chosen word? Yes. There is nothing else for this nomination race (and one fears for the general election) to be about. Each candidate should pray before speaking.